It may just be me, but often the new "new" feature (got it ) does not work.
It seems at random times that a board (take Misc or any other) is reset. What I mean is, old topics I have already read is suddenly unread again. No it is not because there are new posts. The whole first page in the board is unread.
This has not really anything to do with the "new" feature but it was related. As to the "new" feature it works sometimes, and at other times it indicates the first post in the thread is new (even though I have seen it before of course) or the "new" feature takes me to the first post, but "new" is not indicated anywhere on any of the pages of the topic. This happens independently of the other problem mentioned above.
Am I really the only one with these problems? Or are everyone just not talking about them?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it a simple case of storing the time of the last visit?
Then you compare the post times to the last visit times and if its newer then show as New... hopefully you're not using a 'Read' flag for each post...
I think most forums store your last visit for each forum in your account record, instead of relying on the browser cookies. If you want to rely on the browser, why not use a sneaky trick (as used on http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware/ ) and use the browser's 'Visited' link colour to distinguish old posts? You just store the number of replies in the link URL and the browser will 'unvisit' links with new posts.